Blog Tour, Guest Post, & Giveaway: The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth

Crushed on by kelly, on June 9, 2020, in Blog Tour, Giveaways, Guest Post, New Releases / 2 Comments

Blog Tour, Guest Post, & Giveaway: The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth

Today we are kicking off The Falling in Love Montage tour with a guest post about Ciara’s favorite rom coms! The Falling in Love Montage is the perfect pick for Pride reads this month so we hope you’ll check out Ciara’s post and enter to win a copy at the end of the post!



Blog Tour, Guest Post, & Giveaway: The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth

The Falling in Love Montage

by Ciara Smyth
Published by: HarperTeen
on June 9, 2020
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary
Pages: 368
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Saoirse doesn’t believe in love at first sight or happy endings. If they were real, her mother would still be able to remember her name and not in a care home with early onset dementia. A condition that Saoirse may one day turn out to have inherited. So she’s not looking for a relationship. She doesn’t see the point in igniting any romantic sparks if she’s bound to burn out.

But after a chance encounter at an end-of-term house party, Saoirse is about to break her own rules. For a girl with one blue freckle, an irresistible sense of mischief, and a passion for rom-coms.

Unbothered by Saoirse’s no-relationships rulebook, Ruby proposes a loophole: They don’t need true love to have one summer of fun, complete with every cliché, rom-com montage-worthy date they can dream up—and a binding agreement to end their romance come fall. It would be the perfect plan, if they weren’t forgetting one thing about the Falling in Love Montage: when it’s over, the characters actually fall in love… for real.




Ciara Smyth’s Favorite Rom Coms

I have so many favourites, naturally that’s part of what inspired the book, but the ones I like most are the ones that don’t always fit the strictest dimensions of the genre. Some people are very strict about what they think a rom-com is and I don’t feel that way. I don’t think a story has to hit every beat off to count and honestly that’s a little boring if you ask me! I’m a huge fan of structure and I don’t think you need to reinvent the wheel to tell a good story, but there’s nothing wrong with tweaking it either, as long as it makes sense. So I’m going to talk about two favourites and why I love that they’re a little different.

One of my favourite Sandra movies is Hope Floats. Now this is controversial because it has some pretty negative reviews but I implore people to give it a chance! (Bonus it also stars a very young Mae Whitman as her surly daughter Bernice.)

 Birdee Pruitt finds out her husband is cheating on her, on a Ricky Lake style show and she takes her daughter and moves across the country to move back in with her mother. Very quickly she runs into a former high school classmate Justin Matisse. It follows the basic structure of a rom-com. There’s a meet (again) cute, a falling in love montage, conflict and resolution (spoiler alert). But the relationship that Birdee has with her mother, her daughter, and herself feels more central to the plot than the romance. She wrestles with her self-perception, coming back home again feeling like she’s failed and the potential she had but never met. It’s only when she finds herself and remembers that she’s a person in her own right outside of being a wife and mother, that she can be open to a new relationship. And yes, in case you’re wondering it is also funny and sweet and romantic! 

Next up is a classic that I think is on every fan’s favourite rom-coms ever list. My Best Friend’s Wedding. And yet it completely ripped up the rule book. Julieanne’s best friend Michael is getting married and all of a sudden she realizes that she wants him instead. Julieann behaves terribly. She tries to sabotage Michael’s (admittedly far too young and naïve) fiancée, she wreaks havoc with their lives just to try and break them up. She considers only her own feelings in her pursuit of the guy. And yet somehow, after all that, you still like her. You still want her to be happy. 

But the most radical thing about the movie is that Julianne does not win. She doesn’t end up with the guy. She doesn’t even fall in love with another guy. She ends up dancing at Michael’s wedding with her very patient friend. You know at the end of the movie that Julianne didn’t really love Michael, she was just afraid of loss and change. And you know she’s going to have to navigate that before she meets someone. 

The legend goes that in early test screenings Julianne meets a man at the wedding and audiences did not like it because they didn’t feel like she deserved a ‘reward’ given her actions. I prefer to think the audience recognized that Julianne could have her happy ending without a boyfriend. She could be comfortable with the way relationships end and change and she could move on, with new friends by her side. 

 



About Ciara Smyth

Ciara Smyth is a social work student by day, writer by night and cat enthusiast 24/7.

Her first YA novel - about memory, rom-coms and girls who like girls - will be published in Summer 2020 by Andersen Press in the UK and HarperCollins in the US.

She previously worked as a teacher and mental health trainer. She enjoys jigging (verb: to complete a jigsaw) and claims to enjoy yoga in order to cultivate a zen persona that is shattered approximately ten minutes after you meet her.

She is from the south of Ireland but has lived in Belfast for so long that her parents make fun of her Northern accent.



Giveaway

  • 2 copies of THE FALLING IN LOVE MONTAGE by Ciara Smyth
  • US Only
  • Please be aware that delays due to COVID-19 may occur on the shipping of the prizes.
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2 responses to “Blog Tour, Guest Post, & Giveaway: The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth

  1. Andrea Carroll

    I can’t wait to read this timely novel. Sounds like it will be fun…

  2. Alexis S.

    It sounds great! Definitely on my tbr! My favorite genre is probably drama.